Not completely true. I think now that the Pope has only a tiny army to defend his tiny Holy See, the Catholic church has been saying a lot more about "peace on Earth" than it had in the past.
You seriously underrate Einsten if you believe he was limited to a quasi-Newtonian world view. He wrote something like 3 out of the first 10 papers on quantum mechanics, becoming the first to (quite boldly) apply it beyond black-body radiation (everyone knew something novel was needed to explain black-body radiation, but not for Einstein's choices of the photo-electric effect, optical coefficients, and specific heat of solids) and was quite possibly one of the first (or second, after Poincare) to realize that something fundamentally non-classical was going on in Planck's calculation. (Read Kuhn's book on Planck and the "Quantum Discontinuity.") He also wrote a paper on the chaotic motion of the helium atom defeating a semi-classical approach which was something like *50* years ahead of its time.
I believe essentially the opposite; that Einstein was greatly influenced by statistical mechanics; he knew that atomic spectra were always measured in cases using quite large numbers of atoms/molecules to create the line spectra, and that to attribute the emission of spectra to isolated atoms was logically unjustified.
Nowadays, we can *do* experiments on isolated atoms and verify that, individually, they do obey quantum principles. In the 1920s when Bohr was handwaving through concepts like complementarity, there was no concrete basis for such a belief.
Yes, if I were willing to keep my computer online and/or orient my life around eBay auction ending times (which seem to always be something like 2 a.m. Saturday night), as opposed to browsing eBay and leaving bids when I have the time and inclination.
Like you, I put in my maximum willing bid, and wait to see what happens.
The cost of snipers is that I really don't find out I am outbid until 30 seconds before the auction ends.
From an economic point of view, the sniper wins if he is willing to pay more than my maximum price, and that's OK with me. From a convenience point of view, if I were outbid immediately, I would look at *other* listings sooner, instead of having to wait days for a sniper to finally reveal his ultimate bid. *That's* a pain in the ass, waiting for midnight 3 days from now for the sniper to reveal himself.
The alternative to ignorant and misguided use of military force is informed and wise usage of military force.
The main cause of the current disaster in Iraq is that the invasion and post-invasion rebuilding were planned and executed under the direction of folks who were actively misinformed and ignorant of basic facts of the Middle East and Iraq. For instance, "crusade" is the absolute worst word to use to describe a policy in the Mideast, but GWB used it. Turkish involvement in Iraq would bring back memories of the Ottoman Empire, but some idiots thought that all Muslims are alike, so involving Turkey would smooth things over; anybody who could count the population of Iraq figured it would take about 300,000 troops, but Shinseki was shitcanned and we went in with half that number; Iraq had nothing to do with (and Saddam Hussein was absolutely opposed to the agenda of) Islamic fundamentalism and Al Qaeda, but the Bush administration seems to actually believe it's political rhetoric tying those together; Iraq was a barely cohesive entity made up of three distinct ethnic/religious groups with no history of peacful and democratic co-existence, but the administration believed it could be magically turned into a multi-party multi-ethnic democracy overnight.
Somebody who knew anything about Iraq, for example, the British experience there in the 1920's and 1930's, would have agreed with GHWB's decision that toppling Saddam Hussein would cause mass disruption and create a fertile environment for lots of stuff bad for America to happen. In fact, they might have recognized that the main threats to America on Sept 12th 2001 were something like 1) Al Qaeda based in Afghanistan 2) North Korea 3) Pakistan 4) Iran.... 20) Iraq, and would have acted accordingly instead of nursing some adolescent kick-Saddam's-ass fantasy.
Can we suggest replacing fucking idiotic incompetent faith-based morons with capable, intelligent, fact-based experts without being labeled as wimps?
And, by the way, the primary reason Bill Clinton didn't get Osama bin Laden with cruise missiles is because our "ally in the war on terror" Pakistan tipped him off.
The very plain fact is that far more Iraqis have died in this *year to date* in sectarian and insurgent violence than died in the September 11th attacks. That sectarian and insurgent violence was *directly* unleashed by the U.S. invasion that was completely based on the decisions of the Bush administration.
Just because the U.S. didn't benefit doesn't mean it was some kind of admirably selfless act. Actually, it was a giant fuck-up that could have easily been forseen and avoided. That is a BAD THING, get it?
I don't believe the Bush administration deliberately did this to get access to Iraqi oil; I can actually believe GWB justified it to himself by thinking of all the nasty things Saddam Hussein did, although such justification is amazingly selective and based on a complete misunderstanding of Iraq. (E.g. "But he used chemical weapons against his own people!"...no, he gassed Kurds. Saddam Hussein is not a Kurd.) Whatever the justification, the invasion has become an absolute disaster from the point of view of the average Iraqi.
it's another thing entirely for ad-supported software to be installed on a bought-and-paid-for computer,
You forget one thing. You aren't the only one who can "buy and pay" for your "bought and paid for" computer. Dell and other computer vendors sign contracts so that software vendors can "buy and pay" for the right to install their demoware/nagware/adware/crippleware on your brand new computer. Just like software vendors "buy and pay" for shelf space in retail shops.
Don't like it? "Buy and pay" somewhat more to provide a hypothetical competitor the profit margin that Dell is able to maintain with these practices.
The solar system is moving through the "interstellar medium"; the galaxy has plenty of dust, charged particles, and magnetic fields going on, and the heliopause is almost certainly affected by it. The solar system *can* have a velocity with respect to this interstellar medium, and therefore have an asymmetry.
The fact that there is no "luminiferous ether" does not mean that there aren't other material influences that do depend on planetary and stellar motion. Think of meteor showers, for instance. Those depend on the direction in which Earth is moving through clouds of comet debris. We can look up in the sky at various times of year and see that; it definitely depends on the direction of earth's motion.
CNN *International* is actually pretty similar in tone to the BBC World Service.
The CNN shown in the U.S. is becoming less and less straight news in an effort to regain the audience lost to Fox and other cable news outlets.
In any case, from what I've heard on the BBC World Service radio, the interviewers often do ask baited or aggressive questions, flipping sides when they interview people on opposite ends of a conflict. There's nothing inherently non-"respectable" in asking questions of this sort.
religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation.
You miss a key point: this empirical observation lacks *independent* verification. Plus, you have a real freaking strange definition of empirical.
Funny how few people who end up supporting, say, Christian beliefs, came to those beliefs without influence from a parent, preacher, missionary, or other source of information specifically crafted to instill a particular set of beliefs in others.
How many people, through private revelation, come up, through that revelation *alone*, with the doctrine of transubstantiation? Or the Trinity? Or do they simply use private meditation to convince themselves of the truth of what they have heard from other sources? The missionaries don't just say "pray and you will know the truth" because they are talking mostly to non-Christians who already pray but, for some strange reason, have *different* belief structures. They say "read this New Testament and then pray to see if you believe it."
I can do scientific experiments to determine, say, the speed of light, and I get results that match the handbook without having to peek at the value first. Whereas if I want to know Catholic doctrine, I have to pull out the catechism and read it. Or, if I meditate by myself, I find their doctrine on homosexuality to be stupid. How is that empirical?
Funny, those "elves" respond to magnetic fields in remarkably consistent ways. You can do experiments to measure a ratio of q/m that is remarkably consistent, to the extent that you can tabulate the characteristics of the electron with respect to mass, to charge, to spin, to several decimal places.
The definition of "electron" in modern physical theories is *quite* elaborate and *very* restrictive as to what it allows. A throwaway line of "elves playing pool with atoms" contains not the slightest information.
Physics fucking *works*. It is no accident that the transistor, LCD, CRT, laser diode, etc., etc., all arose in the twentieth century, and nothing *at all* like them were developed earlier.
For crying out loud, you can do experiments on fucking *pigeons* and find they respond rationally to price information. There is not some huge burden to force humans to respond to incentives to maximize their happiness.
You think ISPs don't know their costs? That consumers can't understand the price on their internet service?
The burden is on those who want government intervention to provide actually plausible evidence that a market failure is occuring. Almost always these discussions are filled with demagogues who spout nonsense that is absolutely opposite from the facts that would be obvious from the slightest economic analysis. Gas prices go up when the Mideast is in turmoil, people scream "Monopoly!" when if there *were* monopoly power to raise prices, the prices would have already gone up.
The point is that it is *essential* to put these things into the fuller context.
The Constitutional Convention was filled with people who had a wide range of faiths, ranging from Franklin's deistic outlook to more conventional mainline Anglican Protestantism, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Catholics, even Quakers. Some colonies had established/favored churches, and the King of Great Britain had been head of the Anglican church. They knew that the religious variety (although they all assumed a basically Christian flavor, as they were all of Western European descent) made it very difficult to come up with official observances that didn't offend one or more of the important groups. Notice, for instance, that they included an option in the Presidential oath to "affirm" rather than "swear." They were products of the Enlightenment, believing strongly that the political arena ought to be separate from religious factionalism, and took a very liberal view of Biblical texts. They also didn't have the benefit of Darwin's insight, to show that much of Nature did not have to be the product of design.
NONE of the founding fathers were Biblical literalists of the sort that are represented by today's Baptists, for instance. That's the real problem with these discussions, because the people who bring this up are generally trying to connect their particular Bible-thumping Fundamentalist outlook to the "Founding Fathers." That's a complete distortion.
If you look at events, it seems clear that Franklin was trying to settle things down at a particularly contentious point in the negotiations; it could very well have just been a way to bring up an unrelated topic to prevent the arguments over per-state representation from causing the Convention to fail. Instead, they took a recess for a few days, and when they came back, Franklin didn't bring up the prayer issue again.
Basically, this one event doesn't make Benjamin Franklin into Billy Graham, no matter how much the religious types dwell on it. The constitution was a thoroughly NON-religious document. Even the Declaration makes only the most general references to the Creator, Providence, and Sacred Honor.
To be clearer, Benjamin Franklin was probably one of the *first* to realize, when he was hauled before Parliament, that being an "American" meant something other than being a loyal British subject. That is, that people in the colonies could never expect truly fair equal treatment from Parliament, and that American interests would inevitably diverge from those of Britain.
Even many of those involved in the Congress that created the Declaration of Independence had great trouble thinking of themselves as American, as opposed to British subjects who had been wrongly treated by Parliament or the King.
Hardly. The British easily occupied New York, for instance, and didn't evacuate until after the peace treaty. They pretty much dominated the colonial forces under George Washington, except at Trenton, Princeton, and Saratoga, which was the only major victory other than Yorktown Washington achieved.
Perhaps Microsoft, as many retail suppliers do, pays or rewards the retailer for good product placement?
Now, if you said Best Buy has trouble keeping MS Office in stock, while StarOffice ends up in the $2 bargain clearance bin, that says something about consumer demand.
I would like to see them [ID'ers] actually define design, and how to recognize it unambiguously. Then we can start to talk about whether things are designed.
No, that's what they try to do. They come up with some bogus concept like "irreducible complexity", they claim it conclusively identifies "intelligent design", then identify something that has "irreducible complexity" in Nature, then claim they have evidence of ID.
In principle, that is fine. The counter-arguments would go like this
1) Natural selection can produce things that are very near optimal, and can LOOK designed. Lots of pre-Darwinian naturalists marvelled at how "well-designed" stuff is: flowers designed for bees to pollinate, one can go on and on. Darwin's HUGE contribution to knowledge essentially boils down to: things in Nature can LOOK designed, but NOT be. So if you make the slightest mistake in defining design, you get false positives.
2) Design probably can't be proven after the fact; it's really a question of motive and intent. Yes, there's "I know a watch is designed", but really, can you tell how much of the watch's workings were due to human choice, and how many were just accidental, or tradition, or trial and error?
3) "Irreducible complexity" is not equivalent to "cannot arise by natural selection." No one (except someone looking for a straw-man version of evolution to knock down) insists that evolution works only in a straight line from simple to complex. Simple can become reducibly complex *before* being reduced to irreducibly complex. Irreducibly complex generally is equivalent to "the historical evidence of development has been obscured by the process of selection."
The problems are
1) the political ID advocates and the school boards do not wait for the counter-argument to appear, or use it to justify "see there's scientific debate, we need to teach the controversy" instead of as the smackdown that it is.
2) the scientific ID people will just come up with some other example, or strained definition, without admitting that "design" in biology is just a step down the chain of theology to "First Cause".
3) There will always be particular examples (abiogenesis is a big one) where the historical evolutionary path is obscured by more recent changes, and we might *never* come up with the explanation, and the ID argument could say "here's something that was designed." That does not disprove evolution. It just means that the evidence was eaten or otherwise destroyed a long time ago, and we'll never know.
Just because I can't name my great-to-the-20th-grandfather doesn't mean I didn't have one. If he was some illiterate serf, there is probably no evidence (other than my being here) that he ever was. Requiring me to explain every branch of the family tree to disprove that I descended from Adam in the Garden of Eden is too high.
Basically, the whole ID scheme is just bad science. Either through incompetence, or bad faith. To pursue that line of argument is just fruitless, and proves nothing.
You are essentially agreeing with me; I think the important thing to maintain in discussing "truth" is the crucial distinction between an absolute logical truth and a pragmatically "true" basic assumption, which you seemed to be blurring. Especially because religious types often don't maintain the same distinction.
The "physical universe being a sanely consistent place" assumption is almost impossible to avoid once you agree to be pragmatic. Otherwise, you get scared to breathe because, you know, maybe oxygen is bad for you now. From that, you pretty easily get that scientific investigation is the most pragmatically valuable method for gathering additional knowledge.
The other conclusion that is important is that you never claim even basic scientific laws like general relativity to be "true", just "true enough that life is too short to avoid believing it", which scientists shorten to "proven", or if it is their field of active inquiry "currently accepted".
This issue dates all the way back to David Hume, who realized it was insurmountable; Kant thought he had overcome it, but I don't buy it.
Those scientific laws you depend on---on what are they based? A finite number of observations. Those observations are, in principle, isolated events. You can't watch the Earth & planets forever to verify that they keep moving as they do. You watch them for a minute, or an hour, or a year, you still can't be *logically* sure that they will keep doing the same thing. All you can say is that, all the observations that people have happened to make, within experimental error, agree with these laws.
You cannot *logically* deduce scientific laws. That's exactly the fallacy of induction that the original poster was referring to. You can logically assume them as axioms, but you can assume *anything* as an axiom without it being objectively true.
Basically, there is no way to be certain of *anything* in the physical world, and I would extend this to the metaphysical as well, although religious types can claim you can ask God to explain things to you, and you can be sure his answers are true---I consider these to be isolated observations as well, that could turn out to be false, but that's the difference between religion and logic, isn't it?
Religious types stop here and say that because you can't be sure of anything, believing in evolution is the same thing as believing in Genesis, so we're all being religious, aren't we?
The real answer, in my opinion, is that we have to take a pragmatic stance, and assign some provisional level of certainty to our speculations. "3 is a prime number" is very certain, although five minutes from now, the integers could (in a barely conceivable way) change their properties. Gravity rates pretty highly on that scale, as well as other physical laws, because they are based on relatively few, simply understood, basic assumptions, which I give a high level of certainty to. Darwinian evolution would have a high degree of certainty as well, based on the huge amount of observations of so many biological and fossil specimens, the basic logic of Darwin's argument.
The level of certainty I give the Genesis account is very low; it shows very little reason to be objectively distinguished from comparable creation myths of similar age; it makes no concrete claim that shows access to privileged information (as opposed to, say, Jesus explaining quantum mechanics in the Gospels, two thousand years before any experiments had raised the possibility...that would be strong evidence for a direct connection to an omnipotent Creator, as opposed to a philosophy and outlook compatible with first century Judaism.)
Obviously, not everyone agrees with my choice of certainty values, which is why these fucking Slashdot threads go on so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Not completely true. I think now that the Pope has only a tiny army to defend his tiny Holy See, the Catholic church has been saying a lot more about "peace on Earth" than it had in the past.
You seriously underrate Einsten if you believe he was limited to a quasi-Newtonian world view. He wrote something like 3 out of the first 10 papers on quantum mechanics, becoming the first to (quite boldly) apply it beyond black-body radiation (everyone knew something novel was needed to explain black-body radiation, but not for Einstein's choices of the photo-electric effect, optical coefficients, and specific heat of solids) and was quite possibly one of the first (or second, after Poincare) to realize that something fundamentally non-classical was going on in Planck's calculation. (Read Kuhn's book on Planck and the "Quantum Discontinuity.") He also wrote a paper on the chaotic motion of the helium atom defeating a semi-classical approach which was something like *50* years ahead of its time.
I believe essentially the opposite; that Einstein was greatly influenced by statistical mechanics; he knew that atomic spectra were always measured in cases using quite large numbers of atoms/molecules to create the line spectra, and that to attribute the emission of spectra to isolated atoms was logically unjustified.
Nowadays, we can *do* experiments on isolated atoms and verify that, individually, they do obey quantum principles. In the 1920s when Bohr was handwaving through concepts like complementarity, there was no concrete basis for such a belief.
Yes, if I were willing to keep my computer online and/or orient my life around eBay auction ending times (which seem to always be something like 2 a.m. Saturday night), as opposed to browsing eBay and leaving bids when I have the time and inclination.
Like you, I put in my maximum willing bid, and wait to see what happens.
The cost of snipers is that I really don't find out I am outbid until 30 seconds before the auction ends.
From an economic point of view, the sniper wins if he is willing to pay more than my maximum price, and that's OK with me. From a convenience point of view, if I were outbid immediately, I would look at *other* listings sooner, instead of having to wait days for a sniper to finally reveal his ultimate bid. *That's* a pain in the ass, waiting for midnight 3 days from now for the sniper to reveal himself.
False dichotomy.
.... 20) Iraq, and would have acted accordingly instead of nursing some adolescent kick-Saddam's-ass fantasy.
The alternative to ignorant and misguided use of military force is informed and wise usage of military force.
The main cause of the current disaster in Iraq is that the invasion and post-invasion rebuilding were planned and executed under the direction of folks who were actively misinformed and ignorant of basic facts of the Middle East and Iraq. For instance, "crusade" is the absolute worst word to use to describe a policy in the Mideast, but GWB used it. Turkish involvement in Iraq would bring back memories of the Ottoman Empire, but some idiots thought that all Muslims are alike, so involving Turkey would smooth things over; anybody who could count the population of Iraq figured it would take about 300,000 troops, but Shinseki was shitcanned and we went in with half that number; Iraq had nothing to do with (and Saddam Hussein was absolutely opposed to the agenda of) Islamic fundamentalism and Al Qaeda, but the Bush administration seems to actually believe it's political rhetoric tying those together; Iraq was a barely cohesive entity made up of three distinct ethnic/religious groups with no history of peacful and democratic co-existence, but the administration believed it could be magically turned into a multi-party multi-ethnic democracy overnight.
Somebody who knew anything about Iraq, for example, the British experience there in the 1920's and 1930's, would have agreed with GHWB's decision that toppling Saddam Hussein would cause mass disruption and create a fertile environment for lots of stuff bad for America to happen. In fact, they might have recognized that the main threats to America on Sept 12th 2001 were something like 1) Al Qaeda based in Afghanistan 2) North Korea 3) Pakistan 4) Iran
Can we suggest replacing fucking idiotic incompetent faith-based morons with capable, intelligent, fact-based experts without being labeled as wimps?
And, by the way, the primary reason Bill Clinton didn't get Osama bin Laden with cruise missiles is because our "ally in the war on terror" Pakistan tipped him off.
The very plain fact is that far more Iraqis have died in this *year to date* in sectarian and insurgent violence than died in the September 11th attacks. That sectarian and insurgent violence was *directly* unleashed by the U.S. invasion that was completely based on the decisions of the Bush administration.
Just because the U.S. didn't benefit doesn't mean it was some kind of admirably selfless act. Actually, it was a giant fuck-up that could have easily been forseen and avoided. That is a BAD THING, get it?
I don't believe the Bush administration deliberately did this to get access to Iraqi oil; I can actually believe GWB justified it to himself by thinking of all the nasty things Saddam Hussein did, although such justification is amazingly selective and based on a complete misunderstanding of Iraq. (E.g. "But he used chemical weapons against his own people!"...no, he gassed Kurds. Saddam Hussein is not a Kurd.) Whatever the justification, the invasion has become an absolute disaster from the point of view of the average Iraqi.
it's another thing entirely for ad-supported software to be installed on a bought-and-paid-for computer,
You forget one thing. You aren't the only one who can "buy and pay" for your "bought and paid for" computer. Dell and other computer vendors sign contracts so that software vendors can "buy and pay" for the right to install their demoware/nagware/adware/crippleware on your brand new computer. Just like software vendors "buy and pay" for shelf space in retail shops.
Don't like it? "Buy and pay" somewhat more to provide a hypothetical competitor the profit margin that Dell is able to maintain with these practices.
Michelson-Morely is irrelevant.
The solar system is moving through the "interstellar medium"; the galaxy has plenty of dust, charged particles, and magnetic fields going on, and the heliopause is almost certainly affected by it. The solar system *can* have a velocity with respect to this interstellar medium, and therefore have an asymmetry.
The fact that there is no "luminiferous ether" does not mean that there aren't other material influences that do depend on planetary and stellar motion. Think of meteor showers, for instance. Those depend on the direction in which Earth is moving through clouds of comet debris. We can look up in the sky at various times of year and see that; it definitely depends on the direction of earth's motion.
CNN *International* is actually pretty similar in tone to the BBC World Service.
The CNN shown in the U.S. is becoming less and less straight news in an effort to regain the audience lost to Fox and other cable news outlets.
In any case, from what I've heard on the BBC World Service radio, the interviewers often do ask baited or aggressive questions, flipping sides when they interview people on opposite ends of a conflict. There's nothing inherently non-"respectable" in asking questions of this sort.
If you want better sources, try the original Nature article, cited in this Nature news summary.
religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation.
You miss a key point: this empirical observation lacks *independent* verification. Plus, you have a real freaking strange definition of empirical.
Funny how few people who end up supporting, say, Christian beliefs, came to those beliefs without influence from a parent, preacher, missionary, or other source of information specifically crafted to instill a particular set of beliefs in others.
How many people, through private revelation, come up, through that revelation *alone*, with the doctrine of transubstantiation? Or the Trinity? Or do they simply use private meditation to convince themselves of the truth of what they have heard from other sources? The missionaries don't just say "pray and you will know the truth" because they are talking mostly to non-Christians who already pray but, for some strange reason, have *different* belief structures. They say "read this New Testament and then pray to see if you believe it."
I can do scientific experiments to determine, say, the speed of light, and I get results that match the handbook without having to peek at the value first. Whereas if I want to know Catholic doctrine, I have to pull out the catechism and read it. Or, if I meditate by myself, I find their doctrine on homosexuality to be stupid. How is that empirical?
If the eight ball gets pocketed, it's a pretty damn good sign that the cue ball isn't somebody's fucking religous belief.
Funny, those "elves" respond to magnetic fields in remarkably consistent ways. You can do experiments to measure a ratio of q/m that is remarkably consistent, to the extent that you can tabulate the characteristics of the electron with respect to mass, to charge, to spin, to several decimal places.
The definition of "electron" in modern physical theories is *quite* elaborate and *very* restrictive as to what it allows. A throwaway line of "elves playing pool with atoms" contains not the slightest information.
Physics fucking *works*. It is no accident that the transistor, LCD, CRT, laser diode, etc., etc., all arose in the twentieth century, and nothing *at all* like them were developed earlier.
For crying out loud, you can do experiments on fucking *pigeons* and find they respond rationally to price information. There is not some huge burden to force humans to respond to incentives to maximize their happiness.
You think ISPs don't know their costs? That consumers can't understand the price on their internet service?
The burden is on those who want government intervention to provide actually plausible evidence that a market failure is occuring. Almost always these discussions are filled with demagogues who spout nonsense that is absolutely opposite from the facts that would be obvious from the slightest economic analysis. Gas prices go up when the Mideast is in turmoil, people scream "Monopoly!" when if there *were* monopoly power to raise prices, the prices would have already gone up.
Hint, anything that requires AA batteries to operate is using them because it *consumes* power.
The point is that it is *essential* to put these things into the fuller context.
The Constitutional Convention was filled with people who had a wide range of faiths, ranging from Franklin's deistic outlook to more conventional mainline Anglican Protestantism, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Catholics, even Quakers. Some colonies had established/favored churches, and the King of Great Britain had been head of the Anglican church. They knew that the religious variety (although they all assumed a basically Christian flavor, as they were all of Western European descent) made it very difficult to come up with official observances that didn't offend one or more of the important groups. Notice, for instance, that they included an option in the Presidential oath to "affirm" rather than "swear." They were products of the Enlightenment, believing strongly that the political arena ought to be separate from religious factionalism, and took a very liberal view of Biblical texts. They also didn't have the benefit of Darwin's insight, to show that much of Nature did not have to be the product of design.
NONE of the founding fathers were Biblical literalists of the sort that are represented by today's Baptists, for instance. That's the real problem with these discussions, because the people who bring this up are generally trying to connect their particular Bible-thumping Fundamentalist outlook to the "Founding Fathers." That's a complete distortion.
If you look at events, it seems clear that Franklin was trying to settle things down at a particularly contentious point in the negotiations; it could very well have just been a way to bring up an unrelated topic to prevent the arguments over per-state representation from causing the Convention to fail. Instead, they took a recess for a few days, and when they came back, Franklin didn't bring up the prayer issue again.
Basically, this one event doesn't make Benjamin Franklin into Billy Graham, no matter how much the religious types dwell on it. The constitution was a thoroughly NON-religious document. Even the Declaration makes only the most general references to the Creator, Providence, and Sacred Honor.
Franklin proposed that the Convention open each day with prayers, but the proposal was REJECTED.
Patents existed before the U.S. Constitution.
Before 1776, Benjamin Franklin was a British subject, able to get patents from the British crown, according to the Statute of Monopolies of 1610.
To be clearer, Benjamin Franklin was probably one of the *first* to realize, when he was hauled before Parliament, that being an "American" meant something other than being a loyal British subject. That is, that people in the colonies could never expect truly fair equal treatment from Parliament, and that American interests would inevitably diverge from those of Britain.
Even many of those involved in the Congress that created the Declaration of Independence had great trouble thinking of themselves as American, as opposed to British subjects who had been wrongly treated by Parliament or the King.
And exactly which Church Doctrince does "Divine Providence" represent? Good luck?
Benjamin Franklin believed in God the creator, but EXPLICITLY DENIED any faith in the divinity of Christ, for instance.
They had been shredded by the militia down south.
Hardly. The British easily occupied New York, for instance, and didn't evacuate until after the peace treaty. They pretty much dominated the colonial forces under George Washington, except at Trenton, Princeton, and Saratoga, which was the only major victory other than Yorktown Washington achieved.
Perhaps Microsoft, as many retail suppliers do, pays or rewards the retailer for good product placement?
Now, if you said Best Buy has trouble keeping MS Office in stock, while StarOffice ends up in the $2 bargain clearance bin, that says something about consumer demand.
I would like to see them [ID'ers] actually define design, and how to recognize it unambiguously. Then we can start to talk about whether things are designed.
No, that's what they try to do. They come up with some bogus concept like "irreducible complexity", they claim it conclusively identifies "intelligent design", then identify something that has "irreducible complexity" in Nature, then claim they have evidence of ID.
In principle, that is fine. The counter-arguments would go like this
1) Natural selection can produce things that are very near optimal, and can LOOK designed. Lots of pre-Darwinian naturalists marvelled at how "well-designed" stuff is: flowers designed for bees to pollinate, one can go on and on. Darwin's HUGE contribution to knowledge essentially boils down to: things in Nature can LOOK designed, but NOT be. So if you make the slightest mistake in defining design, you get false positives.
2) Design probably can't be proven after the fact; it's really a question of motive and intent. Yes, there's "I know a watch is designed", but really, can you tell how much of the watch's workings were due to human choice, and how many were just accidental, or tradition, or trial and error?
3) "Irreducible complexity" is not equivalent to "cannot arise by natural selection." No one (except someone looking for a straw-man version of evolution to knock down) insists that evolution works only in a straight line from simple to complex. Simple can become reducibly complex *before* being reduced to irreducibly complex. Irreducibly complex generally is equivalent to "the historical evidence of development has been obscured by the process of selection."
The problems are
1) the political ID advocates and the school boards do not wait for the counter-argument to appear, or use it to justify "see there's scientific debate, we need to teach the controversy" instead of as the smackdown that it is.
2) the scientific ID people will just come up with some other example, or strained definition, without admitting that "design" in biology is just a step down the chain of theology to "First Cause".
3) There will always be particular examples (abiogenesis is a big one) where the historical evolutionary path is obscured by more recent changes, and we might *never* come up with the explanation, and the ID argument could say "here's something that was designed." That does not disprove evolution. It just means that the evidence was eaten or otherwise destroyed a long time ago, and we'll never know.
Just because I can't name my great-to-the-20th-grandfather doesn't mean I didn't have one. If he was some illiterate serf, there is probably no evidence (other than my being here) that he ever was. Requiring me to explain every branch of the family tree to disprove that I descended from Adam in the Garden of Eden is too high.
Basically, the whole ID scheme is just bad science. Either through incompetence, or bad faith. To pursue that line of argument is just fruitless, and proves nothing.
You are essentially agreeing with me; I think the important thing to maintain in discussing "truth" is the crucial distinction between an absolute logical truth and a pragmatically "true" basic assumption, which you seemed to be blurring. Especially because religious types often don't maintain the same distinction.
The "physical universe being a sanely consistent place" assumption is almost impossible to avoid once you agree to be pragmatic. Otherwise, you get scared to breathe because, you know, maybe oxygen is bad for you now. From that, you pretty easily get that scientific investigation is the most pragmatically valuable method for gathering additional knowledge.
The other conclusion that is important is that you never claim even basic scientific laws like general relativity to be "true", just "true enough that life is too short to avoid believing it", which scientists shorten to "proven", or if it is their field of active inquiry "currently accepted".
You've just argued in a circle.
This issue dates all the way back to David Hume, who realized it was insurmountable; Kant thought he had overcome it, but I don't buy it.
Those scientific laws you depend on---on what are they based? A finite number of observations. Those observations are, in principle, isolated events. You can't watch the Earth & planets forever to verify that they keep moving as they do. You watch them for a minute, or an hour, or a year, you still can't be *logically* sure that they will keep doing the same thing. All you can say is that, all the observations that people have happened to make, within experimental error, agree with these laws.
You cannot *logically* deduce scientific laws. That's exactly the fallacy of induction that the original poster was referring to. You can logically assume them as axioms, but you can assume *anything* as an axiom without it being objectively true.
Basically, there is no way to be certain of *anything* in the physical world, and I would extend this to the metaphysical as well, although religious types can claim you can ask God to explain things to you, and you can be sure his answers are true---I consider these to be isolated observations as well, that could turn out to be false, but that's the difference between religion and logic, isn't it?
Religious types stop here and say that because you can't be sure of anything, believing in evolution is the same thing as believing in Genesis, so we're all being religious, aren't we?
The real answer, in my opinion, is that we have to take a pragmatic stance, and assign some provisional level of certainty to our speculations. "3 is a prime number" is very certain, although five minutes from now, the integers could (in a barely conceivable way) change their properties. Gravity rates pretty highly on that scale, as well as other physical laws, because they are based on relatively few, simply understood, basic assumptions, which I give a high level of certainty to. Darwinian evolution would have a high degree of certainty as well, based on the huge amount of observations of so many biological and fossil specimens, the basic logic of Darwin's argument.
The level of certainty I give the Genesis account is very low; it shows very little reason to be objectively distinguished from comparable creation myths of similar age; it makes no concrete claim that shows access to privileged information (as opposed to, say, Jesus explaining quantum mechanics in the Gospels, two thousand years before any experiments had raised the possibility...that would be strong evidence for a direct connection to an omnipotent Creator, as opposed to a philosophy and outlook compatible with first century Judaism.)
Obviously, not everyone agrees with my choice of certainty values, which is why these fucking Slashdot threads go on so long.