Falsifiable in principle does not matter. Only falsifiable in practice does. It goes back to a theory at least needing to be interesting in that it promotes new research.
As to astrology- simply making successful predictions does in an of itself say much. For example, instead of hypothesizing astrology, I could hypothesize that whenever you flipped a coin, you would always get heads. Then, if you were to flip a coin 1000 times, I would make a successful prediction roughly 500 times, and an incorrect one 500 times. It is clear that my hypothesis is false. Now, let 500 people flip a coin twice. Roughly 125 of them would get heads twice. They might provide an eyewitness account of the correctness of my theory, but my theory is still wrong. I think it is easy to see that if my theory predicts heads 2/3 of the time instead of all the time, it gets even harder for the individual coin flippers to recognize whether my hypothesis is correct or not. And we have not even allowed that each coin will be slightly different, be flipped in slightly different circumstances, etc.
In any case, those people who flipped the coin twice might have been relying on my theory on head-flipping (the 2/3 head version) to be correct, say to win a bet. Then many more than 125 of them would believe it was correct, but that does not make it so. This is a very good analogy with astrology, except that it is much less clear whether astrology has made a correct prediction than either of my coin hypotheses.
You did forget to add something to the list- you. There is really no evidence for your existence. Show me what part of you I can observe (I was going to say touch, but thought better.) The body that wrote this posting qualifies, I suppose. But it changes so much in substance and form throughout the years that identifying a "you" with it is really just a matter of utility with dubious physical meaning. An invention, if you will, by me (a man), to aid me in understanding, among other things, the post that was written, and to promote the good functioning of the society that allows it. Of course, my own sense of self is an invention as well.
The point is not that ID has "elements of" evolution. It's that it has no falsifiability. In any case, it's obviously not very interesting to practicing biologists, or there would be papers published about it in respectable journals. Frankly, in science "true" is never enough, partly because "true" is not clearly defined. Its easy to say concoct explanations for experiments already done, but its also boring to learn about said theories. Finding a theory that promotes new experiments and new theories is the hard part.
As a side note, I don't know how you can think that there is 4000 years of "empirical evidence" (whatever that means) for astrology. Then again, maybe I misread you.
I think this true, but the things you mention as happening in the 1930's are really not the most interesting things, in my opinion. As someone else said, they aren't really pure physics achievements, except for Atomic Nuclear fission. What about Einstien discovering relativity, which altered our entire perception of space and time since Newton, and eventually culminated in the creation of the nuclear bomb, which came to define the entire second half of the 20th century. Or Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, and (eventually by opposition) Einstein and Planck, as well as many others I didn't mention, ironing out "classical" quantum mechanics, which call into question the nature of all scientific knowledge as we have know it since Newton. Not to mention the fact that Bohr had Jewish origins, and Heisenberg headed Hitler's nuclear power program. Relativity and quantum mechanics changed our perception of reality as much as anything in human history, I think- much more interesting than a helicopter. Not that I don't wish I could ride in a helicopter some day...
No, this is the bizarre thing that special relativity tells us. You may be moving at 0.999c relative to me- but if I shine light from my flashlight, it will move at 1.0c in both directions relative to both of us. Light does not move at c in an absolute frame of reference. Light move at c in ANY "inertial" (non-rotating) reference frame. You are agreeing with Newton and Galileo, not Einsten.
1) To my mind, in your post you still don't established what "primary interpretation" means. Nor do you establish what "common sense" means. (Not that this doesn't mean there is not a more satisfying answer.) Does "common" mean that we sort of vote on what the Bible means. And is this what we think it means the first time we read it, or the 100th (or what ever.) And what about different cultures. For example, in college I read a paper where an anthropologist claimed that a culture of people didn't think in terms of cause and effect, but in terms of events and cycles. I personally wasn't convinced by the paper, but it was a famous paper, so many were. How would such a people's "common sense" or "primary interpretation" of Genesis differ from ours, I wonder. I would think it could easily be very different from our Wester perspective.
To be more immediate, I am a physicist, and especially after studying modern physics, part of me suspects that we can understand ONLY through "allegory", or through models that in some sense are dependent on our own psychology, and that God, or even some hypothetical alien species, would not need to understand the same events. So for me, I'm not even sure if your "literal" reading even makes sense. It's certainly not my common sense reading.
Or what about the Gnostics. I certainly could not convincingly argue a Gnostic interpretation of the Bible, but to them I would presume this was the most straight-forward way to read the Bible. Why your interpretation, and not theirs (assuming the answer is not simply that they were stupid.)
In short, to me "common" or "literal" seems to mean "naive" reading (not to say the person reading is naive), and it seems if I trust a naive reading, I am really only making a statement about my own cultural or personal prejudices. In short, this still doesn't get past the problem of "Which interpretation is the right one?"
2) You write "holding science above the Bible... makes science a religion of sorts." Perhaps. I personally think, and I think most philosophers of science would agree, that all science the method can really do is claim that a hypothesis is false. In some sense, whenever scientists claim something is "true", really what they probably should be saying is "we feel this is the best hypothesis that we've got, and we haven't proven it wrong yet." But for purposes of education children (and this, of course, is where the rubber really hits the road on this issue, why every one is not just having happy conversations as we are now) how do we make these subtle distinctions? I claim this IS NOT the same as saying "evolution is just a theory." Science is also a social institution, and on evolution, for now, the verdict is in: the vast majority of scientists support evolution with some version of natural selection. A dozen PhD's does not a controversy make.
3) While I think the trinity is difficult to understand, my 1==3 comment was not meant to refer to it. I know its more subtle than that. I do think that Jesus as fully human and fully God is more logically difficult. But my point is this- it is not terribly interesting to ask whether there is a Trinity, or how Jesus cana be fully God and fully human. It is much more fruitful to accept these as true, and ask what it MEANS. I think the same is true for evolution and Genesis.
4) As to you comment about the fossil dating- I think you are over-simplifying, and I'm a physicist, not a palientologist so I don't know the details, but yes, it probably is ultimately circular. But it always is. Seriously, I would argue all of science is one big circular argument. That's the best we can do. We come up with some new scientific principle, and we test it, usually relying on some other scientific principle. The best we can hope to be is consistent. Thats what I mean by (2), that science can only prove things false. However, this got us to the moon, and it let us build jet airplanes, and it lets us build nuclear weapons, and gene therapy, and all the other wonderful and terrible things we do in the modern age. Somehow, it works. But it is a kind of miracle.
You write: "If some theory can't be exposed to experiments that could prove it false, it can't be true."
Someone may have written that, but what they should have written is that any scientific theory must accompany an experiment (preferably many experiments) that can disprove it. This is why, say, string theory is always talked about by physicists with the footnote that while it may be interesting and promising, it is still only philosophy and math- because no one has come up with a way to test (ie, potentially disprove) it. If we did not have experiments to test Maxwell, then his theories would still be philosophy as well. Theories are not so much true in a given region as they are false outside that region.
If a 5 year old were to say that he was not convined of Maxwell's equation because he could not understand it, I would marvel at his mature skepticism. Anyone is welcome to be a skeptic. Tell a biologist you are not personally convinced by evolution, and he (or she) should certainly respect that decision. Just don't try to say that there is a serious discontent within the scientific community about Maxwell's equations or evolution- because there is not.
This has confused me too. I always thought that ID was against evolution. However, I saw somebody on the Daily Show who almost seemed to say that ID was against simply natural selection, or maybe even some sort of weird alternate "interpretation" of natural selection.
I've always wondered what is meant by "literal meaning". What exactly does that really mean?
And are you saying you do not believe in the Trinity? (Which of course is fine, and which I grant doesn't conflict with saying there is one God.)
And I didn't mean to say that evolution would sort it out in a couple hundred years, but rather that Christianity would. I would say evolution is pretty much worked out by scientists because it doesn't give a hoot if it agrees with genesis. (By evolution, I mean simply the dates of the different fossil records.) Now the various varities of natural selection are a different matter, but that is off topic, and besides, I convess I'm not a biologist and would have difficulty arguing evolution convincingly.
Again, thank you for the very reasonable post. I don't think we will resolve our differences on slashdot:-). Still, one more comment: You write: "Genesis is by all rational readings authored in a manner that appears intended to depict history, not fantasy." and "we are attempting is the same that any scientist or philosopher attempts - consistency, predictability"
"Ideal" science explicity establishes what it means by "true." I think this is clearest (and perhaps the statement is most true) in physics, the most "mature" of the sciences. A given theory must make a quantitative prediction for a given experiment. If the experiment gives this quantitative result, then the theory isn't true- its just not false. (Of course, practically, scientists are open to a whole host of superstitions and unfounded assumptions.)
If you want to use this as a model for whether the Bible is "true" (and you seem to me to want to do something like this, based on your post), fine. But if we treat the Bible as a scientific theory, it must give us a criterion for its success, or at least lack of failure. I'm sure you know the Bible better than I do, but I've read most of it, and I don't remember where it does this.
The point is, you must establish what is meant by "true". Because as I understand it, science does NOT (note: I am a physicist with something like a minor in philosophy, but I'm not a professional philosopher.) Scientific theories are never TRUE. They are only ever NOT FALSE.
My inclination is to say "Well, something's true if God would describe it that way." And to me, I think God might have described creation according to genesis. I think histories have a tendency to more be a lesson about what was important about what happened, rather than exhaustive description of what events unfolded.
I don't have a child yet. When I do, he will probably ask me how parents have babies, and in particular how my wife and I had him. And I'll tell him its because my wife and I fell in love. And when he's older, I'll give him the mechanics of it, I suppose. But I won't give all the mechanics because my child's existance will basically be an impossible thing that happened. I won't even remember that my wife sneezed one night, and that shifted her belly, which resulted in one sperm getting there before another. I won't tell him that the temperature changed by a few degrees from one day to the next, and that made a difference. I won't tell him all the crazy improbable things that led up to my wife and I meeting, or to our parents meeting. Because I don't understand those things as being important, even though in a sense they are incredibly important, just as important as my wife and I being in love and making love.
I guess my rambling point is that sometimes the lines between truth and allegory blur. I cannot believe that the Truth of the Bible rests on whether God described Genesis as a modern human historian might. (But, I grant you, I'm still young:-))
Yes, certain things are logically impossible, e.g. that 1==3. However, the point I was trying to make is that genesis vs evolution is only at least apparently contradictory. The burden of proof, though, is as much to prove that is is actually contradictory as it is to prove that there is no contradiction.
As to your statement "the Bible doesn't hint at evolution"- perhaps. I'm not a Biblical scholar. However, I suspect that e.g. before Augustine, people might have said that the Bible doesn't hint at original sin either. It took religious genius to show them. Ditto for the trinity.
But this process of "explain a whole lot of things if they expect to get anywhere, because there are significant repercussions if there is evolution and natural selection before sin and death"- doesn't this sound interesting? To me it does. (I'm don't think I agree with you that evolution and natural selection before sin and death has such serious repercussions, but thats not so important.) What might be said? Interesting things, I bet.
Christianity has been ingenius. It will continue to be so. A religion that can come to terms with a fully human, fully God, completely innocent Messiah being put to death for the sins of humanity can figure out a very interesting solution to little problem like this in, say, 500 years tops, I bet. Have a little faith.
LOL! What are you talking about, with your doom and gloom, that we cannot take apparently contradictory positions. Here are two from Christianity: God is One and God is Three (the trinity). Or: Jesus was fully human and fully God. Or from modern physics: light is both a particle and a wave.
I'll assume you made this post in ernest, and have read the Bible, presumably more than I have- its full of contradictions. Just like life. I would argue that's a prerequisite for it being true.
I appreciate your comment. I think it is very reasonable. I do have a question though- isn't focusing so much on whether Genesis is literally true sort of theologically boring? Especially when, as you put it, God can create things that are "mature." (I take that mean that God can create an Earth that "looks" old but is in fact in some sense "young", althought maybe you didn't mean it that way.) But, and I say this as another Christian, we both follow a religion that says that God is One but also Three. A religion that speaks of God as being infinitely good, but has his Jewish people slaughter entire cities, leaving no men or women or children alive, and a God who allows the World Wars and the Holocaust. A God who didn't send our Savior until at least 3000 years into human civilization, and then left huge swathes of people politically or physically unable to worship that Savior and achieve salvation. A God who sent us 10 commandments that arguably say nothing about whether its OK to terminate the existence of a 10 day old embryo for medical research, or allow patents to deny important AIDS medication to impoverished countries, or whether its OK to enlist nuclear devastation to end war earlier.
I could go on. My point is, it seems to me there are a lot of other apparent contradictions that are much theologically serious and interesting than how Genesis can be true if there is evidence for, say, an earth that is 4 billion years old.
I'm just curious- do you have any evidence any of this is true? I only say this because I have thought the same thing myself before.
1) Are "masses of people" really finding ways to skip commercials? Or worded differently, what does "masses" mean? 2) If "masses" are and continue to skip commercials, will the abandon the TV that we love so much? I mean, do they have anywhere else to go? Or would it just mean they would get less of a return on their commercials and make less money, or find ways to make more entertaining commercials 3) If commercials did stop supporting the TV that we love so much, would that TV disappear? Or would it find other ways to make money
Or are you saying that we SHOULD NOT skip commercials (emphasis not meant to be obnoxious...) since the companies count on that money. Because, believe you me, if the TV companies could figure out a way to charge us for each television show, plus advertise more without raising the quality of television, they would. Err, have, actually (well, arguably the quality HAS gone up, I guess.)
These are enterprising people who run these businesses. They will figure something out. Or someone else will.
You refer to increasing entropy as a "law", not a "theory". This seems to be a too-common misunderstanding. Whether something is a "theory" or a "law" is just a matter of convention. Newtonian physics has laws. So does thermodynamics. Modern physics doesn't so much. It has "equations" instead, like Schrodinger's equation or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Why is this? I don't know, but I think most physicsts would say that the uncertainty principle is just as accepted as Newton's "Laws" of motion. For whatever, from what I've seen, biology seems to have mostly "theories". Its all just words, and doesn't necesarily imply that one is any more accepted than the other.
Certainly not only atheists and fundamentalists care about this debate, because I am neither and I care about it. I am not sure that most kids could be more convinced by natural selection than by some sort of ID. Half of the country (I think) still believes human beings came to exist in their present form. And I'm not sure which is more inconceivable- that some intelligence created us as is or that we evolved from other species. I would say probably the latter, since my understanding is that this has been the historical belief.
But yes, science is dogmatic for the lazy and the short of time. I don't think I would call it "brainwashing" if its taught correctly, though. I wonder, could you really argue convincingly for evolution? I don't think I could. I think I would have to think a while to argue the existence of atoms, and I am in physics. So we trust the scientific establishment. We trust serious people to answer questions for us on the origin of our species, on global warming, on the safety of nuclear power, etc., and trust that for THEM, science is not dogmatic. But we must have a trustworthy scientific establishment from which this "dogma" comes. In particular, this scientific establishment must be protected from those who make final scientific judgement based on spiritual fear. And this is under attack here.
I share your frustration though in that people seem to say the same damn things over and over and over...
I think you misunderstand the seriousness of all this. The feelings are over atheism vs theism. The debate is over whether good or bad science will be taught in schools. Wishing away evidence for evolution can be practice for wishing away evidence for global warming, for illegal wars, and for social injustice. To put it perhaps too dramatically, science is the modern approach to rational behavior, and democracy relies on rational behavior to fend off tyranny.
Or perhaps the answer should be: when someone wins the Nobel Prize in Biology for ID, then I will believe that it should be taught in school.
Until then, well, when somebody brings up a scientific theory with no evidence that is against established scientific dogma- and I confess, for me its dogma, i would have difficulty arguing persuasively that evolution occured, and is explained by natural selection in particular- I'll think "quack quack..."
Re:Not that bold, ask a creationist!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, there are lots of questions that science has never been able to answer. For example, and early challenge to Newton was that he assumed what we today might call "spooky action at a distance" in his theory of planetary motion- in other words, how could planets interact through gravity when they were not touching. Similarly, the "medium" through which EM waves (light) travel was never really explained. Finally, modern quantum theory has its own "spooky action at a distance", which Einstien among others was extremely critical of, that also was never really explained. What happened to these questions? Mostly, people decided to stop caring. How can one argue with such genius, I suppose. Or in other words, why worry about these questions when you can go to the moon. But the questions are still there. What is more, a lot of what we, or at least I, mean by the "mind" is arguably metaphysical, or at least purely subjective. Science can never say anything about either the metaphysical, or about the purely subjective. So when neurobiologists talk about explaining the "mind", they are not necessarily talking about the same concept of mind that you and I are intuitively mean when we talk about the mind. Whether we as a society will eventually decide that their concept of mind is good enough to replace our current one can't really be known at this time. I suppose that probably, most people won't ever really understand the difference well enough to make a judgement. We can look again to the example of physics- if you are not a physicist, your conception of position and momentum and time, and even force, are probably hopelessly naive, at least in the sense that if you tried to do a modern physics experiment, you would have no idea what the results would be.
But pseudoscience the original post is not. Simply criticizing reductionism doesn't mean you are a creationist. I congratulate you, though, of being suspicions of pseudoscience. There is a lot of it these days.
Respecting another country means not smoking outside public buildings, or eating with chopsticks, or trying to speak the native language. I also believe that respecting another country means not making the decision for its citizens that hundreds of thousands of them will die in the overthrow of their dictator.
This has nothing to do with inalienable rights. Cultural relativism does not justify the powerful ruling the weak simply because they are powerful, and it does not justify the powerful intentionally keeping information from the weak to keep them weak. If a culture is "incompatible" with this notion, it must change itself.
Unfortunately, freedom is often used to mean "to have a choice." This is not always the case. However, the right for a person to pursue new ideas transcends country or culture.
Of course, it seems pretty stupid to me to knowingly break the law in China or any other foreign country.
Slashdot Mirror
Falsifiable in principle does not matter. Only falsifiable in practice does. It goes back to a theory at least needing to be interesting in that it promotes new research.
As to astrology- simply making successful predictions does in an of itself say much. For example, instead of hypothesizing astrology, I could hypothesize that whenever you flipped a coin, you would always get heads. Then, if you were to flip a coin 1000 times, I would make a successful prediction roughly 500 times, and an incorrect one 500 times. It is clear that my hypothesis is false. Now, let 500 people flip a coin twice. Roughly 125 of them would get heads twice. They might provide an eyewitness account of the correctness of my theory, but my theory is still wrong. I think it is easy to see that if my theory predicts heads 2/3 of the time instead of all the time, it gets even harder for the individual coin flippers to recognize whether my hypothesis is correct or not. And we have not even allowed that each coin will be slightly different, be flipped in slightly different circumstances, etc.
In any case, those people who flipped the coin twice might have been relying on my theory on head-flipping (the 2/3 head version) to be correct, say to win a bet. Then many more than 125 of them would believe it was correct, but that does not make it so. This is a very good analogy with astrology, except that it is much less clear whether astrology has made a correct prediction than either of my coin hypotheses.
You did forget to add something to the list- you. There is really no evidence for your existence. Show me what part of you I can observe (I was going to say touch, but thought better.) The body that wrote this posting qualifies, I suppose. But it changes so much in substance and form throughout the years that identifying a "you" with it is really just a matter of utility with dubious physical meaning. An invention, if you will, by me (a man), to aid me in understanding, among other things, the post that was written, and to promote the good functioning of the society that allows it. Of course, my own sense of self is an invention as well.
The point is not that ID has "elements of" evolution. It's that it has no falsifiability. In any case, it's obviously not very interesting to practicing biologists, or there would be papers published about it in respectable journals. Frankly, in science "true" is never enough, partly because "true" is not clearly defined. Its easy to say concoct explanations for experiments already done, but its also boring to learn about said theories. Finding a theory that promotes new experiments and new theories is the hard part.
As a side note, I don't know how you can think that there is 4000 years of "empirical evidence" (whatever that means) for astrology. Then again, maybe I misread you.
I think this true, but the things you mention as happening in the 1930's are really not the most interesting things, in my opinion. As someone else said, they aren't really pure physics achievements, except for Atomic Nuclear fission. What about Einstien discovering relativity, which altered our entire perception of space and time since Newton, and eventually culminated in the creation of the nuclear bomb, which came to define the entire second half of the 20th century. Or Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, and (eventually by opposition) Einstein and Planck, as well as many others I didn't mention, ironing out "classical" quantum mechanics, which call into question the nature of all scientific knowledge as we have know it since Newton. Not to mention the fact that Bohr had Jewish origins, and Heisenberg headed Hitler's nuclear power program. Relativity and quantum mechanics changed our perception of reality as much as anything in human history, I think- much more interesting than a helicopter. Not that I don't wish I could ride in a helicopter some day...
No, this is the bizarre thing that special relativity tells us. You may be moving at 0.999c relative to me- but if I shine light from my flashlight, it will move at 1.0c in both directions relative to both of us. Light does not move at c in an absolute frame of reference. Light move at c in ANY "inertial" (non-rotating) reference frame. You are agreeing with Newton and Galileo, not Einsten.
1) To my mind, in your post you still don't established what "primary interpretation" means. Nor do you establish what "common sense" means. (Not that this doesn't mean there is not a more satisfying answer.) Does "common" mean that we sort of vote on what the Bible means. And is this what we think it means the first time we read it, or the 100th (or what ever.) And what about different cultures. For example, in college I read a paper where an anthropologist claimed that a culture of people didn't think in terms of cause and effect, but in terms of events and cycles. I personally wasn't convinced by the paper, but it was a famous paper, so many were. How would such a people's "common sense" or "primary interpretation" of Genesis differ from ours, I wonder. I would think it could easily be very different from our Wester perspective.
... makes science a religion of sorts." Perhaps. I personally think, and I think most philosophers of science would agree, that all science the method can really do is claim that a hypothesis is false. In some sense, whenever scientists claim something is "true", really what they probably should be saying is "we feel this is the best hypothesis that we've got, and we haven't proven it wrong yet." But for purposes of education children (and this, of course, is where the rubber really hits the road on this issue, why every one is not just having happy conversations as we are now) how do we make these subtle distinctions? I claim this IS NOT the same as saying "evolution is just a theory." Science is also a social institution, and on evolution, for now, the verdict is in: the vast majority of scientists support evolution with some version of natural selection. A dozen PhD's does not a controversy make.
To be more immediate, I am a physicist, and especially after studying modern physics, part of me suspects that we can understand ONLY through "allegory", or through models that in some sense are dependent on our own psychology, and that God, or even some hypothetical alien species, would not need to understand the same events. So for me, I'm not even sure if your "literal" reading even makes sense. It's certainly not my common sense reading.
Or what about the Gnostics. I certainly could not convincingly argue a Gnostic interpretation of the Bible, but to them I would presume this was the most straight-forward way to read the Bible. Why your interpretation, and not theirs (assuming the answer is not simply that they were stupid.)
In short, to me "common" or "literal" seems to mean "naive" reading (not to say the person reading is naive), and it seems if I trust a naive reading, I am really only making a statement about my own cultural or personal prejudices. In short, this still doesn't get past the problem of "Which interpretation is the right one?"
2) You write "holding science above the Bible
3) While I think the trinity is difficult to understand, my 1==3 comment was not meant to refer to it. I know its more subtle than that. I do think that Jesus as fully human and fully God is more logically difficult. But my point is this- it is not terribly interesting to ask whether there is a Trinity, or how Jesus cana be fully God and fully human. It is much more fruitful to accept these as true, and ask what it MEANS. I think the same is true for evolution and Genesis.
4) As to you comment about the fossil dating- I think you are over-simplifying, and I'm a physicist, not a palientologist so I don't know the details, but yes, it probably is ultimately circular. But it always is. Seriously, I would argue all of science is one big circular argument. That's the best we can do. We come up with some new scientific principle, and we test it, usually relying on some other scientific principle. The best we can hope to be is consistent. Thats what I mean by (2), that science can only prove things false. However, this got us to the moon, and it let us build jet airplanes, and it lets us build nuclear weapons, and gene therapy, and all the other wonderful and terrible things we do in the modern age. Somehow, it works. But it is a kind of miracle.
You write:
"If some theory can't be exposed to experiments that could prove it false, it can't be true."
Someone may have written that, but what they should have written is that any scientific theory must accompany an experiment (preferably many experiments) that can disprove it. This is why, say, string theory is always talked about by physicists with the footnote that while it may be interesting and promising, it is still only philosophy and math- because no one has come up with a way to test (ie, potentially disprove) it. If we did not have experiments to test Maxwell, then his theories would still be philosophy as well. Theories are not so much true in a given region as they are false outside that region.
If a 5 year old were to say that he was not convined of Maxwell's equation because he could not understand it, I would marvel at his mature skepticism. Anyone is welcome to be a skeptic. Tell a biologist you are not personally convinced by evolution, and he (or she) should certainly respect that decision. Just don't try to say that there is a serious discontent within the scientific community about Maxwell's equations or evolution- because there is not.
This has confused me too. I always thought that ID was against evolution. However, I saw somebody on the Daily Show who almost seemed to say that ID was against simply natural selection, or maybe even some sort of weird alternate "interpretation" of natural selection.
Perhaps confusion was the idea.
I've always wondered what is meant by "literal meaning". What exactly does that really mean?
And are you saying you do not believe in the Trinity? (Which of course is fine, and which I grant doesn't conflict with saying there is one God.)
And I didn't mean to say that evolution would sort it out in a couple hundred years, but rather that Christianity would. I would say evolution is pretty much worked out by scientists because it doesn't give a hoot if it agrees with genesis. (By evolution, I mean simply the dates of the different fossil records.) Now the various varities of natural selection are a different matter, but that is off topic, and besides, I convess I'm not a biologist and would have difficulty arguing evolution convincingly.
Again, thank you for the very reasonable post. I don't think we will resolve our differences on slashdot :-). Still, one more comment:
:-))
You write:
"Genesis is by all rational readings authored in a manner that appears intended to depict history, not fantasy."
and
"we are attempting is the same that any scientist or philosopher attempts - consistency, predictability"
"Ideal" science explicity establishes what it means by "true." I think this is clearest (and perhaps the statement is most true) in physics, the most "mature" of the sciences. A given theory must make a quantitative prediction for a given experiment. If the experiment gives this quantitative result, then the theory isn't true- its just not false. (Of course, practically, scientists are open to a whole host of superstitions and unfounded assumptions.)
If you want to use this as a model for whether the Bible is "true" (and you seem to me to want to do something like this, based on your post), fine. But if we treat the Bible as a scientific theory, it must give us a criterion for its success, or at least lack of failure. I'm sure you know the Bible better than I do, but I've read most of it, and I don't remember where it does this.
The point is, you must establish what is meant by "true". Because as I understand it, science does NOT (note: I am a physicist with something like a minor in philosophy, but I'm not a professional philosopher.) Scientific theories are never TRUE. They are only ever NOT FALSE.
My inclination is to say "Well, something's true if God would describe it that way." And to me, I think God might have described creation according to genesis. I think histories have a tendency to more be a lesson about what was important about what happened, rather than exhaustive description of what events unfolded.
I don't have a child yet. When I do, he will probably ask me how parents have babies, and in particular how my wife and I had him. And I'll tell him its because my wife and I fell in love. And when he's older, I'll give him the mechanics of it, I suppose. But I won't give all the mechanics because my child's existance will basically be an impossible thing that happened. I won't even remember that my wife sneezed one night, and that shifted her belly, which resulted in one sperm getting there before another. I won't tell him that the temperature changed by a few degrees from one day to the next, and that made a difference. I won't tell him all the crazy improbable things that led up to my wife and I meeting, or to our parents meeting. Because I don't understand those things as being important, even though in a sense they are incredibly important, just as important as my wife and I being in love and making love.
I guess my rambling point is that sometimes the lines between truth and allegory blur. I cannot believe that the Truth of the Bible rests on whether God described Genesis as a modern human historian might. (But, I grant you, I'm still young
Yes, certain things are logically impossible, e.g. that 1==3. However, the point I was trying to make is that genesis vs evolution is only at least apparently contradictory. The burden of proof, though, is as much to prove that is is actually contradictory as it is to prove that there is no contradiction.
As to your statement "the Bible doesn't hint at evolution"- perhaps. I'm not a Biblical scholar. However, I suspect that e.g. before Augustine, people might have said that the Bible doesn't hint at original sin either. It took religious genius to show them. Ditto for the trinity.
But this process of "explain a whole lot of things if they expect to get anywhere, because there are significant repercussions if there is evolution and natural selection before sin and death"- doesn't this sound interesting? To me it does. (I'm don't think I agree with you that evolution and natural selection before sin and death has such serious repercussions, but thats not so important.) What might be said? Interesting things, I bet.
Christianity has been ingenius. It will continue to be so. A religion that can come to terms with a fully human, fully God, completely innocent Messiah being put to death for the sins of humanity can figure out a very interesting solution to little problem like this in, say, 500 years tops, I bet. Have a little faith.
LOL! What are you talking about, with your doom and gloom, that we cannot take apparently contradictory positions. Here are two from Christianity: God is One and God is Three (the trinity). Or: Jesus was fully human and fully God. Or from modern physics: light is both a particle and a wave.
I'll assume you made this post in ernest, and have read the Bible, presumably more than I have- its full of contradictions. Just like life. I would argue that's a prerequisite for it being true.
Hi:
I appreciate your comment. I think it is very reasonable. I do have a question though- isn't focusing so much on whether Genesis is literally true sort of theologically boring? Especially when, as you put it, God can create things that are "mature." (I take that mean that God can create an Earth that "looks" old but is in fact in some sense "young", althought maybe you didn't mean it that way.) But, and I say this as another Christian, we both follow a religion that says that God is One but also Three. A religion that speaks of God as being infinitely good, but has his Jewish people slaughter entire cities, leaving no men or women or children alive, and a God who allows the World Wars and the Holocaust. A God who didn't send our Savior until at least 3000 years into human civilization, and then left huge swathes of people politically or physically unable to worship that Savior and achieve salvation. A God who sent us 10 commandments that arguably say nothing about whether its OK to terminate the existence of a 10 day old embryo for medical research, or allow patents to deny important AIDS medication to impoverished countries, or whether its OK to enlist nuclear devastation to end war earlier.
I could go on. My point is, it seems to me there are a lot of other apparent contradictions that are much theologically serious and interesting than how Genesis can be true if there is evidence for, say, an earth that is 4 billion years old.
I'm just curious- do you have any evidence any of this is true? I only say this because I have thought the same thing myself before.
1) Are "masses of people" really finding ways to skip commercials? Or worded differently, what does "masses" mean?
2) If "masses" are and continue to skip commercials, will the abandon the TV that we love so much? I mean, do they have anywhere else to go? Or would it just mean they would get less of a return on their commercials and make less money, or find ways to make more entertaining commercials
3) If commercials did stop supporting the TV that we love so much, would that TV disappear? Or would it find other ways to make money
Or are you saying that we SHOULD NOT skip commercials (emphasis not meant to be obnoxious...) since the companies count on that money. Because, believe you me, if the TV companies could figure out a way to charge us for each television show, plus advertise more without raising the quality of television, they would. Err, have, actually (well, arguably the quality HAS gone up, I guess.)
These are enterprising people who run these businesses. They will figure something out. Or someone else will.
You refer to increasing entropy as a "law", not a "theory". This seems to be a too-common misunderstanding. Whether something is a "theory" or a "law" is just a matter of convention. Newtonian physics has laws. So does thermodynamics. Modern physics doesn't so much. It has "equations" instead, like Schrodinger's equation or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Why is this? I don't know, but I think most physicsts would say that the uncertainty principle is just as accepted as Newton's "Laws" of motion. For whatever, from what I've seen, biology seems to have mostly "theories". Its all just words, and doesn't necesarily imply that one is any more accepted than the other.
Certainly not only atheists and fundamentalists care about this debate, because I am neither and I care about it. I am not sure that most kids could be more convinced by natural selection than by some sort of ID. Half of the country (I think) still believes human beings came to exist in their present form. And I'm not sure which is more inconceivable- that some intelligence created us as is or that we evolved from other species. I would say probably the latter, since my understanding is that this has been the historical belief. But yes, science is dogmatic for the lazy and the short of time. I don't think I would call it "brainwashing" if its taught correctly, though. I wonder, could you really argue convincingly for evolution? I don't think I could. I think I would have to think a while to argue the existence of atoms, and I am in physics. So we trust the scientific establishment. We trust serious people to answer questions for us on the origin of our species, on global warming, on the safety of nuclear power, etc., and trust that for THEM, science is not dogmatic. But we must have a trustworthy scientific establishment from which this "dogma" comes. In particular, this scientific establishment must be protected from those who make final scientific judgement based on spiritual fear. And this is under attack here. I share your frustration though in that people seem to say the same damn things over and over and over...
I think you misunderstand the seriousness of all this. The feelings are over atheism vs theism. The debate is over whether good or bad science will be taught in schools. Wishing away evidence for evolution can be practice for wishing away evidence for global warming, for illegal wars, and for social injustice. To put it perhaps too dramatically, science is the modern approach to rational behavior, and democracy relies on rational behavior to fend off tyranny.
Or perhaps the answer should be: when someone wins the Nobel Prize in Biology for ID, then I will believe that it should be taught in school. Until then, well, when somebody brings up a scientific theory with no evidence that is against established scientific dogma- and I confess, for me its dogma, i would have difficulty arguing persuasively that evolution occured, and is explained by natural selection in particular- I'll think "quack quack..."
Actually, there are lots of questions that science has never been able to answer. For example, and early challenge to Newton was that he assumed what we today might call "spooky action at a distance" in his theory of planetary motion- in other words, how could planets interact through gravity when they were not touching. Similarly, the "medium" through which EM waves (light) travel was never really explained. Finally, modern quantum theory has its own "spooky action at a distance", which Einstien among others was extremely critical of, that also was never really explained. What happened to these questions? Mostly, people decided to stop caring. How can one argue with such genius, I suppose. Or in other words, why worry about these questions when you can go to the moon. But the questions are still there. What is more, a lot of what we, or at least I, mean by the "mind" is arguably metaphysical, or at least purely subjective. Science can never say anything about either the metaphysical, or about the purely subjective. So when neurobiologists talk about explaining the "mind", they are not necessarily talking about the same concept of mind that you and I are intuitively mean when we talk about the mind. Whether we as a society will eventually decide that their concept of mind is good enough to replace our current one can't really be known at this time. I suppose that probably, most people won't ever really understand the difference well enough to make a judgement. We can look again to the example of physics- if you are not a physicist, your conception of position and momentum and time, and even force, are probably hopelessly naive, at least in the sense that if you tried to do a modern physics experiment, you would have no idea what the results would be.
But pseudoscience the original post is not. Simply criticizing reductionism doesn't mean you are a creationist. I congratulate you, though, of being suspicions of pseudoscience. There is a lot of it these days.
Respecting another country means not smoking outside public buildings, or eating with chopsticks, or trying to speak the native language. I also believe that respecting another country means not making the decision for its citizens that hundreds of thousands of them will die in the overthrow of their dictator. This has nothing to do with inalienable rights. Cultural relativism does not justify the powerful ruling the weak simply because they are powerful, and it does not justify the powerful intentionally keeping information from the weak to keep them weak. If a culture is "incompatible" with this notion, it must change itself. Unfortunately, freedom is often used to mean "to have a choice." This is not always the case. However, the right for a person to pursue new ideas transcends country or culture. Of course, it seems pretty stupid to me to knowingly break the law in China or any other foreign country.